James McDonald Hyde (June 25, 1873 – July 18, 1943) was a metallurgist who designed the first significant froth flotation plant in the United States.
Offered a job in industry, he left the university in the fall of 1906, and spent the next three years during a mining boom that went bust with the Panic of 1907: he was metallurgist for a silver mill in Guanajuato, Mexico, 1906-1907; then an assayer for the Charles Butters & Company's cyanide plant at Virginia City, Nevada, 1907; then, 1907-1908, superintendent of a small stamp mill and attached cyanide plant at the short-lived gold rush town of Manhattan, Nevada; and then managed a gold prospect in the California Mother Lode country.
[9] Aubrey countered that Hyde spent "too much time theorizing, with the result that nothing was getting accomplished in the museum" and was "a savant with his head swelled out of all proportion."
In 1989 Hyde was posthumously inducted into the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum in Leadville, Colorado, as a result of his installation of the first froth flotation process in the United States.
[12]In January 1910, his Stanford classmate Theodore J. Hoover offered Hyde a job with the Minerals Separation, Limited, of which he was manager in the London Office.
The firm had perfected an early froth flotation process in their labs and in the field, and introduced it with great financial success at the massive zinc-lead deposits of Broken Hill, Australia.
Although Hoover backed out of the purchase, Hyde was hired by the owners of the Butte and Superior Copper Company and built a successful, small test plant in 1911.
The Minerals Separations, Ltd., company disagreed and declared an infringement of its flotation process patent and began a lawsuit that took five years and ended in the U. S. Supreme Court.
"[12] Unfortunately for Hyde, at issue in the court's eyes was not how a box was shaped or a cell was devised but about the "process" of introducing air and limited amounts of oil to make the metals in the finely ground ore "float."
Thomas Arthur Rickard, editor of the Mining & Scientific Press, San Francisco, made Hyde's suit, and the others that followed against Minerals Separation, into a cause celeb, where the firm was described as evil incarnate.
[16] Hyde received professional accolades, probably the greatest being during the many talks on flotation, recognizing his primacy, presented at the American Institute of Mining Engineer's conference in Arizona, September 1916.
In 1916-1917, his biggest personal financial failure was on the lease of the Genesee-Vanderbilt group of mines above Silverton, Colorado, and the construction of a flotation mill that failed because of complex ores.
[18] By 1917, Hyde had relocated back to Palo Alto and was hired as a consulting metallurgist for the U. S. Bureau of Mines experiment station at Stanford.
In 1927, he resigned from Stanford to, officially, return to his consultant work in Mexico and Southern California, but, unofficially, to become more active in Republican politics.
"[27] In 1931, Hyde ousted incumbent Councilman Thomas F. Cooke from his 2nd District seat and was reelected every two years until the election of 1939, when he was defeated by Norris J. Nelson.
[31] 1934 Hyde also introduced a resolution that would have put the council on record in opposition to public assistance to the unemployed in favor of a plan that would have governmental agencies help in granting credit to "those who can create employment for themselves and others."
[27] 1935 Hyde was accused of asking "patent paving" contractors and others to invest in his Good Hope Mine venture, but he said he always kept his private business separate from his City Council activities.
[33] 1936 Hyde and Councilman Parley Parker Christensen were able to block the allocation of $2,000 to deliver to Berlin, Germany, the flag that had flown over the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles.
The two council members "assailed Hitler and Nazism and said their constituents did not want the city to spend public money" to send the Games flag to Germany.